Notes on Marx

Here's some quick notes about where I am going in all my Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach posts:

Why marx turns specifically to the economy (at least in his early writings):
because it is hegelian nature (what is outside dialectic, i.e. [perhaps, this isn't right exactly if taken strictly] what is outside reappropriation into the movement of becoming of being and nothingness--i.e. it is brute being, a-dialectical being) conceived RIGHTLY: i.e. not in Feuerbach or Stirner's sense. It is nature that is already social, but this "already" is not due to the movement of the dialectic. How?

This all revolves around trying to see the ultimate general direction of Marx's enterprise with respect to Hegel and especially with respect to the Hegel of Feuerbach, Stirner, and Bruno Bauer (but especially Feuerbach). Obviously, this is extremely reductive. But it might help nevertheless: one needs fundamentally to conceive, in a very brutal, basic sense, why exactly Marx got so intrigued with political economy as a site for dialectic. Althusser is especially good regarding this need. But he can come off as too rigid, because he's trying perhaps to do too much for us at once: understand both the contingency and the necessity of this interest of Marx with respect to others and with respect to the movement of his own thought. But in the end, one should read Althusser with this more humble project in mind--namely, being able to account for the particular specificity of Marx's analysis to the economy and to a historically determined, finite period (to be a little redundant) of the economy (I try to show this a little regarding The Communist Manifesto in another post). In other words, one needs to be able to link in the back of one's mind the project of Hegel to something like this late quote on "the trinity formula" from Capital III:

Capital, land, labor! But capital is not a thing, it is a social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing and gives this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and the produced means of production. Capital is the means of production as transformed into capital, these being no more capital in themselves than gold or silver are money. It is the means of production monopolized by a particular section of society...

-Capital III, 953

Something is said here about the particular historicity of what is being analyzed, and it can be elucidated by comparing it to Hegel via Feuerbach in its general tenor. One then, of course, has to try and realize more specifically how this historicity is refined and specific to Marx's particular task at this moment in time, and whether he has already perhaps abandoned this model and its general tenor altogether. In other words, it doesn't hurt to hear Hegel resounding in what Marx is saying here, in order to begin to attune oneself to the background noise of Marx that may be totally indifferent to Hegel (to botch a metaphor).

Lacan against Derrida

I realize I've been pitting these two thinkers against each other here constantly, but only to, in the end, constantly elaborate the Derridian criticism of Lacan and not the other way around. This is not due to any prejudices I have against Lacan and in favor of Derrida (though I do have some against Lacanians) so much as it is my taking longer to come to grips with the scope of Derrida's project. But now, I think, I'm in a position to let Lacan have his word, if only because I feel that I can let his voice criticize Derrida without reducing Derrida to what he is not (as is so commonly and easily done).

For what does Derrida, in the end, despise in Lacan? If we look back at "Le Facteur de la Verité," we're liable to see that it is not Lacan's assumption that structure (language) is in the end determining (though this is a constant grievance of Derrida's and is constantly tried to be refuted by Lacanians--most notably Zizek), but that Lacan's interpretative method when reading Freud is in certain places so extremely powerful.

Now, what do we mean by this? Let's revisit a famous lecture he gave at Johns Hopkins in 1966:

When I began to teach something about Psychoanalysis I lost some of my audience, because I had perceived long before then the simple fact that if you open a book of Freud, and particularly those books which are properly about the unconscious, you can be absolutely sure — it is not a probability but a certitude — to fall on a page where it is not only a question of words — naturally in a book there are always words many printed words — but words which are the object through which one seeks for a way to handle the unconscious. Not even the meaning of the words, but words in their flesh, in their material aspect (from Lacan.com).

Now, unlike so many other times in Lacan ("The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning"), I think this passage disarms with its straightforwardness, its simplicity, its ability to be verified. This would make sense, as it is precisely outlining the transition between a phenomenological approach to Freud and a structural one. In short, Lacan is pinpointing that fulcrum in Freud's work that he is constantly leaning on: the fact that Freud is using words to grasp at the unconscious not through their meaning, but through some of their relationships to each other. Look at the analysis of Irma's injection. What is important is not so much the deployment of Freud's ever amassing conceptual apparatus (condensation, displacement, etc.) in order to make sense of the dream, but how willing Freud is to let certain words in which he originally brought the dream to language ("...my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls . . .. propionic acid . . . trimethylamin...") work out the functioning of the dream of themselves, as it were. That is, Lacan sees that what is important is that Freud approaches the unconscious with certain formations or instances of structure that let him get a handle on its larger possible constitution, and do so much better than a sort of analysis by way of locating its operations by trying to apply a sort of network of explanatory concepts (repression, sublimation, etc.).

Lacan thus adopts this perspective towards the unconscious, and reads Freud for instances in which this perspective is apparent or lurking beneath the surface of his faculties. He too comes up with a network of explanatory concepts (object petit a, the Real, etc.), but notice that this is not what Derrida is angry at. This is not the case, because Derrida (like the best Lacanians) knows that these concepts themselves explain little. Thus it is just as futile for someone to read Lacan and think that they can map out the functioning of the subject by way of these terms as it is for someone to read Freud and merely look at when and where he is using "repression:" Alain Badiou is a supreme example of the bankruptcy of this approach as a communication of what Lacan is getting at, as well as Zizek and Bruce Fink, to a lesser extent. And in both Zizek and Badiou, this occasionally leads them to seriously fail to think a situation thoroughly: their way of talking about Lacan feeds back into the way they understand Lacan--being in the end closer to what we are calling Lacan and Freud's "perspective" than their statements allegedly explaining him. This is why Lacan's diagrams and mathemes don't pretend to explain anything wholly, and Lacan in his seminars always remains ironic towards them.

No, Derrida does not attack this aspect in Lacan. He attacks precisely that perspective which Lacan sees in Freud and adopts. He does so because he fundamentally thinks it does not remain as provisional or heuristic as it should. In other words, Derrida thinks that utilizing certain concepts as elements of a structure in order to "get a handle on the unconscious" is  doing more than "getting a handle on" something. This is his criticism of bricolage more generally.

Lacanians have defended Lacan against this charge, as we've already seen, by trying to turn Lacan's conceptual apparatus into something that can be shown to be anti-structuralist, and thus accommodating to Derrida's demands. In short, they seek to make Lacan's insight into something that is able to account for its provisionality, its heuristic character. Thus the turn towards Badiou and the fanaticism with which Lacanians demand that Lacan's thought have an "ontology." Thus Zizek's vanguardism when it comes to politics--and this is where things get dangerous on a Lacanian view of things--which prescribes the strategic and performative positioning of leaders in the role of the analyst, the "subject who is supposed to know," with respect to society.

But one might ask whether Derrida's demand--the demand that this utilization of concepts account for the possibility that it is doing more than getting a handle on whatever it is supposed to get a handle on--one might ask whether this demand is exactly applicable to what is most powerful and interesting and fundamental in Lacan (that is, what Derrida hates about Lacan!). I would argue that it might not. Indeed, it will absolutely apply in many (many!) cases with Lacan. But with what is most powerful and at the very heart of his readings of Freud and his analysis of the subject... this might be doubted.

Now, this is not because what Derrida asks is wrong. And it is absolutely, absolutely (I can't stress this enough) not because what Derrida asks isn't "practical," or is an impossible demand. Both of these views are held by Zizek and many other Lacanians, and this I think is what makes them particularly dangerous in some instances.

It is because Lacan's analysis by way of structures is not heuristic or provisional. Immediately, though, we must say (again against Lacanians) that this is not because it is universal, i.e. grounded in a universal ontology (even if this ontology itself is merely a procedure, merely provisional, like Badiou's). Rather it is merely because Derrida demands that something not be as heuristic as it is when, from the beginning, it does not function that way. Ultimately, this fundamental feature of Lacan's analysis, its core that constitutes its amazing power, works with structures that constitute more a density than a structure (that is, if structure is conceived as what operates provisionally, as bricolage). At least when Lacan is most powerful, most faithful to what we have seen him find in Freud. These structures are not provisional nor universal, then, but operational within certain conditions, when a certain situation has constellated itself just so. And this is why Lacan is best not when he is analyzing culture but when he is reading Freud. He is delimiting these densities or structures qua densities as they operate in Freud such that the entire Freudian project is not so much made commensurate conceptually with some sort of postmodernism (by being founded upon some secure postmodern ontological basis), but instead is made more robust as a mode of thinking and of analysis. Robust, in the sense that these densities are densities of possibility: Lacan explains the possibility of Freud thinking along a particular line and having certain thoughts available to him but only perhaps half-articulated or even not articulated at all--not because of the terms he uses and the connections between them, but precisely because of the structure or density that makes possible a particular nexus of thoughts in Freud's writing. Look at "The Economic Problem of Masochism:" to proceed through this essay as if Freud is merely dealing with his own terms and not reaching towards that point where he can conclude certain things by moving along the lines of a certain structure--a structure which Lacan can specify--would be unproductive. Why? Because, as Lacan understands, Freud is precisely moving in this other way, whether he wants to or not: he is trying to get a handle on the problem by means of certain other terms--terms that function within a certain structure with a certain density within the limits of his particular problematic. This is to say that Lacan reveals certain tendencies or functions in Freud's thought that locally determine (i.e. not provisionally, nor universally) the possibility of other thoughts either more or less developed falling into their places in his thinking. The task then for Lacan is to try and work out these structures a little more explicitly, while employing the same sort of approach.

I might elaborate on this more later, when I myself can express or communicate it better. But it seems to me this is what Derrida can't quite attack fully in his reading of Lacan, and thus what constitutes the limits of the Derridian project also. This project thus sometimes makes impossible demands in the wrong places--and it is not that it is wrong to impossibly demand (on the contrary, this is necessary), nor that one can't actually do anything when the project makes this demand in some place, but that one can't do anything with his thought when it is in the wrong place. In the end it is not a failing of the impossibility of the demand itself that Derrida puts to Lacan, but one of the fact that Derrida, to paraphrase an apt yet only tangentially related phrase of Foucault, cannot isolate that element of Lacan that he would attack by reducing all other elements to the relatively undifferentiated category of "the excluded" (cf. The Archaeology of Knowledge, 9). So Derrida attacks Lacan, but not that crucial Lacan which falls short of his demand. And this is not because the attack is wrong in principle, but because Derrida cannot see that the Lacan excluded from his critique can be a differentiated category, itself perhaps containing crucial elements. It is in this space that the really crucial Lacan lies--the place of the powerful Lacan. This is that Lacan that can profitably extend and work out the structures that make possible certain aspects of Freudian thought--and not to establish these structures as universal, or claim to use them only provisionally, but in order to more thoroughly develop particular possibilities out of the density of a structure in directions that Freud went and in others that he did not.

Some notes on Lévi-Strauss

Here are just some notes on various quotes from Lévi-Strauss' oft-read essays "Structural Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology," in Structural Anthropology, which I myself was rereading. I should note that one probably should not read this particular essay without having ready at hand both Of Grammatology and Between Men.

In our haste to apply the methods of linguistic analysis, we must not forget that, as a part of vocabulary, kinship terms must be treated with linguistic methods in direct and not analogous fashion. Linguistics teaches us precisely that structural analysis cannot be applied to words directly, but only to words previously broken down into phonemes. There are no necessary relationships at the vocabulary level ("Structural Analysis," 36; Lévi-Strauss' italics).

In other words, as Lévi-Strauss explains in more detail later, structural analysis can only proceed by breaking down what is to be analyzed into discrete signifiers. One does not consider the relationship between signifier and signified (the sign or word considered at "the vocabulary level"), but looks at the relationships between signifiers. So when looking at a phenomenon, one must first attend to the representation or signifier: structural analysis proceeds by looking at "symbols," and not the things themselves as he says later. Or rather, it considers the analysis of symbols as the only possible way of getting at the things as they are.

Nothing can be conceived or given beyond the fundamental requirements of its [the "atom of kinship's"] structure, and, in addition, it is the sole building block of more complex systems; or, more accurately speaking, all kinship systems are constructed on the basis of this elementary structure, expanded or developed through the integration of new elements. Thus we must entertain two hypotheses: first, one in which the kinship system under consideration operates through the simple juxtaposition of elementary structures, and the where the avuncular relationship therefore remains constantly apparent; second, a hypothesis in which the building blocks of the system are already of a more complex order. In the latter case, the avuncular relationship [the characteristic trait in the functioning of the four terms of the atom of kinship], while present, may be submerged within a differentiated context (48; my italics).

The key here is that once a structure is constituted (once its atom is specified), one can account for the fact that not all empirical instances will exemplify the atom of the structure via the appearance of its characteristic trait (in kinship, Lévi-Strauss says this is the avuncular relationship caused by the incest-taboo) exactly in two ways. First, as he says, the various terms of the elementary structure can flip around or have different relations, thus producing a different appearance of the trait, thus making it an imperfect exemplification of the atom. Second and more common, the trait will be functionally present but hidden or submerged under the lens of analysis. In other words, the characteristic trait of the structure--as in the case of the avuncular relationship) will disperse itself or hide itself, repressed by the orientation of the structure to only appear in the context in which that structure is situated. In other words, it fades into the background, yet is absolutely constitutive and active within the functioning of the structure. Thus, the empirical instance of the structure will not have the atom form exactly because its characteristic trait will be dispersed.

The idea expressed in the above passage [by Radcliffe-Brown], that the biological family constitutes the point of departure from which all societies elaborate their kinship systems has not been voiced solely by Radcliffe-Brown. There is scarcely an idea which would today elicit greater consensus. Nor is there one more dangerous, in our opinion. Of course, the biological family is ubiquitous in human society. But what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature. A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation (50; my italics).

This is probably the most general point about structural analysis: the point is that it is supposed to provide an artificial and arbitrary system, a technique or principle around and along which any particular empirical phenomenon would organize itself. Nature and the organic are subtracted, and claims to essentialism resisted. The danger of structural analysis, as Derrida and Sedgwick alledge, is that it can always not thoroughly eradicate nature even though it pretends to accomplish this. I think one of the most interesting ways of dealing with this danger is Derrida's: trying to conceive, not so much the arbitrariness qua play--Derrida himself warns us about taking this particular approach too seriously--but rather the technicity of this system in a more rigorously technical manner, according to Derrida. This means considering it not just as a principle for analysis (a bricolage) but as an infinitely technical, wholly mechanical operation or functioning. This has the effect of bringing back the empirical and the calculable, as Sedgwick does, trying to make the system or structure indeed account for it not clinging to supposedly dispersed or alleged traits as "present," though dispersed.